One of my main hobbies, outside of work and playing football is spearfishing. (For those of you that don't know, that's underwater fishing, where your tools are your speargun and the ability to hold your breath long enough.) Spearfishing half an hour drive from where you work is one of the joys and advantages of living on an island with a sunny climate where distances are small.

Due to this, I was particularly interested in this piece of news about a new mobile website about fishing and I am posting it here, in case any of you also spend your time near the sea, or a river, fishing and share my passion for the sea. From the article itself:

The plan is to turn Fishing.Mobi into a social network for fisherfolk who happen to be mobile savvy. It will offer users resources for researching fishing trips, techniques and providing them access to other members for advice and fishing reports while they are fishing. Fishing.Mobi will be suited to the “dotMobi” standard requirements enabling it to be available on all enabled handsets.

According to information from the newest National Survey of Fishing, Hunting, and Wildlife-Associated Recreation, during 2006, 30.0 million people fished, 12.5 million hunted, and 71.1 million participated in at least one type of wildlife-watching activity such as observing, feeding, or photographing fish and other wildlife in the United States. Nielsen Mobile stats say that 95 million Americans subscribe to mobile Internet access and 40 million of them regularly go online with their phones. If the fishing stats are right, this is a tempting target market for any of you promoting outdoors related products and services.

Figures, here in Greece, are bound to be as high (in terms of percentages), because these are lots of people fishing and hunting, though I cannot give official figures (and doubt there are any). My point is, I think this has real potential, because it brings real value in a place where you need it.

For example, I sometimes come out of the sea with a fish or two whose species I'm not too sure about, and being able to identify them by using the mobile internet to access the fishing website, really adds something to the whole experience. Of course, I would do this now with existing websites, and my current data plan, except they don't quite display properly on my device, and are pretty unusable.

Mike Hodgdon, C.O.O. at First Light Net said it best:

“The mobile phone internet is really one of the most amazing resources in the history of “fishing”. Historically anglers were limited to resources like, print periodicals that provided dated fishing reports… now anglers will have access to hundreds of hours of fishing videos, fishing reports, tips, a fishing resources directory, fishing forum and wealth of tools like tide information, weather reports, but most importantly they will have literally at their finger tips, a network of tens of thousands of anglers to answer questions and provide potentially live reports on the body of water they are fishing, while they are actually fishing.”

I look forward to seeing something like this here in Greece! If anyone is reading this and thinking about starting it up, I will be your first visitor!